Ethiopian Eunuch - Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia

Isaiah 53:1 Who has believed what we have heard?
And on whom has the arm
of the SOVEREIGN GOD been revealed?
2 He grew up before God like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or splendor that we should see him,
and there was nothing in his appearance
that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by humankind;
a man of suffering and one familiar with disease;
and as one who hid his face from us,
he was despised, and we held him of no account.
4 Surely he carried our sickness,
and our sufferings he bore.
And we, we accounted him plagued,
stricken and afflicted by God.
5 But he was wounded for our sins,
crushed for our iniquities;
he was disciplined for our wellbeing,
and by his bruises we were healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the RIGHTEOUS GOD has visited on him
the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
like a sheep that is led to the slaughter,
and like a female lamb, silent before her shearers,
so he did not open his mouth.
8 By an evisceration of justice he was taken away.
And his generation, who could have imagined – ?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
plagued for the transgression of my people.
9 He made his grave with the wicked
and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
10 The JUST GOD delighted in crushing him with pain.
If you make his life an offering for sin,
he shall see his offspring, and shall lengthen his days;
the delight of the ALMIGHTY GOD shall prosper through him.
11 Out of his troubled soul he shall see;
he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge.
My righteous servant, shall make the many righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will allot him a portion with the many,
and with the mighty he shall divide the spoil;
because he poured out his soul to death,
and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he carried the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.
Psalm 22:6 I am a worm, and not human;
scorned by others, and despised by the people.
7 All who see me mock at me;
they make mouths at me, they shake their heads;
8 “Commit your cause to the TRUSTWORTHY GOD;
let God deliver—
let God rescue the one in whom he delights!”
9 Yet it was you who took me from the womb;
you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
10 On you I was cast from my birth,
1

and since my mother bore me you have been my God.
11 Do not be far from me,
for trouble is near
and there is no one to help.
25 From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will pay before those who fear him.
26 The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the LIVING GOD.
May your hearts live forever!
27 All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the FAITHFUL GOD;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before God.
28 For dominion belongs to the SOVEREIGN GOD
who rules over the nations.
29 To God, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down;
before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
and I shall live for God.
30 Posterity will serve God;
future generations will be told about the Lord,
31 and proclaim God’s deliverance to a people yet unborn,
saying that God has done it.
Acts 8:25 Now after Peter and John had testified and
spoken the word of the Lord, they returned to Jerusalem,
proclaiming the good news to many villages of the Samaritans.
26 Then messenger of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go
toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to
Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) 27 So he got up and went.
Now there was a Nubian eunuch, a senior official of the
Kandake, queen of the Nubians, in charge of her entire
treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship 28 and was
returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the
prophet Isaiah. 29 Then the Spirit spoke to Philip and She said,
“Go over to this chariot and join it.” 30 So Philip ran up to it
and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. Philip asked, “Do
you understand what you are reading?” 31 The Nubian replied,
“How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip
to get in and sit beside him. 32 Now the passage of the scripture
that he was reading was this:
“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
and like a lamb silent before its shearer,
so he does not open his mouth.
33 In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.”
34 The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask
you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone
else?” 35 Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this
scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. 36
As they were going along the road, they came to some water;
and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent
me from being baptized?” 38 He commanded the chariot to
stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into
the water, and Philip baptized him. 39 When they came up out
of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the
eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. 40 But
Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through
the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until
he came to Caesarea.
2

John 15:1 “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower.
2 He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit.
Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more
fruit. 3 You have already been cleansed by the word that I have
spoken to you. 4 Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the
branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine,
neither can you unless you abide in me. 5 I am the vine, you are
the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much
fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. 6 Whoever
does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers;
such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. 7
If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever
you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 My Father is glorified by
this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.
Let us pray: Holy One of Old, open our eyes that we
may see. Amen.
This is the last Eucharist of the academic year. And our
lectionary texts have led us into the wilderness. For some it will
be the last Eucharist of their academic career, of their seminary
sojourn. For others it will mark the end of a first year seminary
experience full of new ideas and previously unimagined
learnings. And for others it marks one more year on a journey
with an uncertain path and perhaps less certain outcome. And it
is, I think, divinely provident that this week’s lectionary
portions have in fact led us into a particular wilderness.
The story in Acts 8 takes place on the side of the road in
the wilderness, and at a crossroads, an intersection. I am not
referring to the wilderness of the roads from Jerusalem to Gaza
– there was no single road in the Roman era that transversed the
fifty miles from Jerusalem to Gaza. One would have to travel a
series of spider-web zig-zagging roads from Jerusalem south to
Hebron, west to the Ephrathah Valley crossroads, south to
Beersheba and northwest to Gaza on the coast, if one wanted a
chariot-capable road. (Hebrew Bible students should be
checking their atlases and reminding themselves for whom the
Ephrathah Valley is named in preparation for next week’s
examination. Not to mention translating the back of my
chasuble.)
The other wilderness in which this story from Acts takes
place is the wilderness of biblical interpretation. This wilderness
is also marked by a crossroad. At the intersection of race and
ethnicity, the Greek gentile Philip crosses paths with the black
Jewish bureaucrat whom I’ll name shortly.
In this same wilderness, Jewish Scripture intersects
Christian Scripture and Jesus is right in the middle, literally at
the crossroads. For Philip, the Gentile, the whole bible is
3

apparently all about Jesus. But to be fair, he was probably
taught this system of exegesis by Jews, who although and
perhaps because, they recognized Yeshua ben Miryam
L’Natzeret, Jesus of Nazareth, Mary’s Baby, as the Messiah of
whom their prophets prophesied, still identified themselves as
Jews, as Israel.
What can we learn from this wilderness encounter at this
particular crossroad? Should you who have been laboring for
the better part of a year to supplement your Christian
interpretive lenses with ancient Near Eastern and Israelite
contextual lenses grind those new spectacles under foot and
return to wearing your former prescription? Does the story in
Acts mean that the Hebrew Scriptures are really the Old
Testament and are in fact all about Jesus who is in fact lurking
under every bush in the bible? Is this going to be on the final?
What if I were forced to answer the question I keep
asking my students: What is a faithful Christian reading of
Isaiah 53 that preserves its ancestral contextual integrity? What
if I were in that chariot? What would I say? And perhaps most
importantly, would the Kandake’s servant still be baptized?
Let me begin (again) by retelling the story and filling in
a few details. There is a biblical tradition that extends to modern
Ethiopia of naming royal servants after their monarchs. Some of
the names of biblical servants and eunuchs that are attested in
Amharic, the contemporary Semitic language of Ethiopia
include: Avimelek – my father is king, (this name is also found
in the bible for men who are not royal – or other – eunuchs or
servants.) Abdimelek – servant of the king and Melech –
literally “king” but used as an indication of servitude. These last
two names belonged to Ethiopian eunuchs who served in the
Roman Era in Rome.
Borrowing from this tradition, I will call the official
Abdimalkah, “servant of the Queen.” Because he has a name
and, the fact that it has been lost to us does not mean that he
should be stripped of his dignity along with whatever else he
may have had to surrender for his career. We’ll come back to
his sacrifice.
I have named him Abdimalkah, because he was in fact, a
servant of a queen. The Kandakes were the Queens and Queen
Mothers of Meroe on the Nile – the Anchor Bible Dictionary
persists in calling it a “kingdom” in spite of the fact that women
4

and ruled there individually and only occasionally had male co-
regents. The Kandakes were well-regarded warriors; some
taking on the mighty Roman Empire and, the Kandakes were
also priestesses of Isis. A second century BCE historian said
that the Kandakes were the only real rulers in what I translate as
“a queendom.”
While the Kandake in Acts is not named, she is very
likely Kandake Amanitore, the co-regent of Meroe, called Kush
in the Hebrew Scriptures who reigned from about 1 to 20 or
perhaps as long as 50 CE. Kush was later called Nubia and
finally, Ethiopia. It corresponds with parts of contemporary
Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt.
Kandake Amanitore is the most likely referent because
her monuments that exist to this day would have been well
known during the first century. Her successor, Amantitere, is
also a possibility.
The writer of Acts may well have expected readers to
know all of these things. There is another relevant tradition, that
of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, that when Solomon and I
quote 2 Kings – “gave the Queen of Sheba her every desire” she
returned home pregnant and the two monarchies maintained
friendly diplomatic relations across time, exchanging gifts
including the scriptures of Israel after their production.
This tradition maintains that Abdimalkah as I call him,
was reading Kandake Amanitore’s copy of Isaiah on that
wilderness road when he arrived at that crucial intersection.
There is some support for this in the text; Abdimalkah has been
to worship in Jerusalem. He is a Jew. Israelite religion would
have been introduced to the people in the broader Ethiopian
cultural context by the Sheba-Solomon connection.
So let us use what my ancestors called sanctified
imagination and see what would happen if I were Phillipa and I
joined Abdimalkah in his chariot. I would say, “Abdimalkah
these words:
And he, because he has been ill–treated,
does not open his mouth;
like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
and as a lamb is silent before the one shearing it,
so he does not open his mouth.
In his humiliation his judgment was taken away.
Who will describe his generation?
Because his life is being taken from the earth…
These words are from the Greek Scroll of the prophet
Isaiah and were written more than four hundred years ago. I
5

know that they are a bit different from the Hebrew Scroll of this
same prophet; that line about this man’s life being taken from
the earth isn’t in the Hebrew one.
You ask of whom does the holy prophet speak? I tell
you, it is Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified, and more than
that, who rose from the dead in our very days. I knew him; I sat
at his feet and learned the scriptures of Israel from with and
through him. I heard him teach that we should touch the
untouchable, love the unlovable and forgive the unforgivable
because that is how God loves us. And more, this virgin-born
Jesus, who was and is God-in-Human-Flesh, Immanuel in the
Hebrew tongue which I know is related to your own language,
has power that no one has seen since the days of the prophets of
old. When I hear these texts, I hear Jesus because of my
experience with Jesus.
But they have other meanings as well. The ancestors of
the followers of Jesus from Judea believed that these words
spoke of people in Judah in days gone by. The holy words
spoke to them of those who suffer as they did when the
Babylonians destroyed their nation. It spoke of the suffering of
the innocent with the guilty and perhaps of the suffering of the
innocent on behalf of the guilty. For many believe that the sins
of their ancestors brought the destruction of the nation and even
the Temple in which God dwelled on earth. But they were not
all guilty. Yet they all suffered. In ancient days, people believed
that to be cut off from the land of the living in this text was a
description of Israel in exile and, the lengthening of days refers
to the restoration of the monarchy. This caused no end of
confusion when Jesus was teaching among us; some believed
that he would launch an armed revolt against the Romans.
I have learned from studying the scriptures of Israel with
the Judeans that even when sacred scripture was understood in a
completely different way in another time, it speaks to those of
us who hear and read it today in our time. And some say, that it
will continue to speak to generations, yet unborn across the
ages.
Abdimalkah, I believe that these verses speak of Jesus of
Nazareth who waded in the waters of the Virgin’s womb,
walked the way of suffering, and woke from the grasp of death
in the deep darkness of the morning.
And, seminary community, I believe that interpreting the
scriptures of Israel in their own context does not diminish the
6

proclamation of the Gospel. It is in fact a greatly impoverished
gospel that can only stand on texts whose sure foundation has
been eradicated.
And I believe, that when God decided to give birth to
the African Church, a Church that survives into modernity
without schism or reformation, and God appointed Philip as its
midwife, and that Abdimalkah the eunuch becomes God’s
firstborn in this new and continuing community.
In order to work for most monarchs in the ancient Near
East and North Africa, men had to be surgically neutered. The
monarchs did not want top-level employees trying to pass on
power to their children and establishing dynasties of their own,
or forming adulterous liaisons and undermining the
government. Ironically, most eunuch formed intimate
partnerships with other eunuchs or intact males, not royal
women.
What then are we to make of these things as we prepare
to leave this place for all time or for some time? There are
several ways in which we can consider eunuchs.
First, we can consider them to be anachronisms; that is,
they are relics of an ancient time and antiquated social system
and do not have parallels in our modern-techno-web-based
society. For who among us would voluntarily sacrifice his
plumbing for a job? There is at least one contemporary parallel,
in a nuclear reactor in a small town, nearly destroyed by
unemployment some years ago, some women were hired at an
unimaginable cost. Those who were of child-bearing age had to
agree to be sterilized, so that there would be no possibility of
lawsuits over babies with birth defects. That employment
contract was eventually overturned.
The last way we can understand eunuchs is as social and
sexual outsiders. There are many who view lesbians, gay men,
bisexuals and those in the process of having their gender
surgically altered as outsiders from the fold of God and society
at large. Those who are born with an indeterminate gender or
who have been injured – burn patients often loose all of their
extremities including their genitalia – quadriplegics, paraplegics
and infertile women and couples can also feel like sexual and
social outsiders.
All of these folk for one reason or another do not fit in
the dominant image of the American dream in which every
woman was born to be a mother and every man was born to be a
7

father in a hetero-patriarchal marriage that produces 2.4
children. There are many who consider anyone who doesn’t
want to, or is not able to have a ‘traditional’ family as outsiders
to the American dream and ‘traditional family values’
advocated by churches in the name of God.
Eunuchs can then be seen as those who do not fit into
our neatly constructed gender paradigms as neatly as we might
wish. If we understand eunuchs to be social and sexual outsiders
whether born or made, then God chose to birth the faithful
African Church though a queer person’s body.
This Gospel is that God’s concern for the woman-born
was manifested in God, Godself, becoming woman-born, for the
redemption and liberation of all the woman-born: gay, straight,
crooked and confused, from fear and from death itself. Yeshua
the Messiah, the Son of Woman, came to seek out and save the
lost and to give his life as a ransom for many.
13 May 2009
The Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Hebrew and Hebrew Bible
The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia
8